I have a recording of interviews I did with all my living grandparents for a school project when I was a kid. One thing that stood out was the level of abject poverty they experienced. They were teenagers during the great depression and it definitely had a major impact on all of them.

I don’t know.

This is generally known as “land contract/contract for deed”. People do it all the time. As suggested in another comment, you should consult an attorney. If either you or your mom is hesitant to do that, you should ask yourself what happens to your house and mortgage if (God forbid) your mom were to die? Don’t wait to find out. Get an attorney and make sure that it’s all ironed out in advance.

Just an expensive timer.

There’s a reason Allstate is the most frequently sued auto insurance provider. They will give you the run around all day long until you lawyer up and then it’s, “Oh! Ha ha! Sowwy! We bunch of dum dums who no can read and no use kumputers good. We no know what happened! Here big check for you go away now.”

But for every person who lawyers up, there are probably 20 more who don’t. Fuck Allstate.

No, the real one is standing up.

Door opener fluid. It’s a canister of fluid that you have to pump into the door to open it in an emergency. Then you get a replacement canister from the dealer for $150. I recently found out that that’s what passes for a “spare tire” anymore.

During WWII the United States government rounded up tens of thousands of people, including many US citizens, and put them in internment camps because they looked sort of similar to the people who bombed pearl harbor. Why? Because fear is a powerful drug and when people are afraid, logic tends to go out the window, if there was any logic to begin with. If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you’ll notice that much of it is intended to stoke fear, while inserting themselves as the solution. They do it because it works.

Way out in the Arkansas Delta, in a soybean field 50 miles from anywhere, there is a memorial where one of these internment camps stood. If you aren’t looking for it, you’d probably drive right by it unnoticed. All around the camp there are these little voice boxes that you push a button on and it explains what you’re looking at. The voice providing the narration is none other than George Takei who was held there with his family as a child. Spend a little time at a place like this and it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that America has always rejected fanaticism.

Linqpad is awesome! Sadly, I don’t get to code in C# for my day job anymore but I still use Linqpad all the time. It’s main purpose originally was for building and testing Entity Framework SQL queries but it will run basically any C# code you plug into it on the fly.

Now, I primarily use it for testing out design concepts that end up getting translated to TypeScript. I also use it for validating the hot garbage that Elastic Search is serving up on a given day so I can send a nifty little report (Linqpad easily generates and exports tabular data) to the data team to show them that it is in fact their Elastic Search template that is an error laden dumpster fire rather than my code.

If you’re familiar with C#, F#, or Visual Basic, Linqpad is an incredibly valuable tool.

I read an interview in the Democrat-Gazette with the daughter of Ms. Taylor, one of the victims. There are no words to describe how awful it must be to have one of your friends or family members just minding their own business only to be shot to death while checking out at the grocery store.

Ms. Taylor’s daughter expressed frustrations that she wasn’t there because she thought she could have done something, implying that she would have shot the assailant. In her defense, the woman’s grieving and people who are in that state tend to think and say all kinds of stuff.

But here’s the thing, the “good guy with a gun” mantra is idealistic at best. Even if you are a “good guy” with a gun, odds are that by the time you can even respond, the “bad guy” has already killed someone. Not to mention that in that very panic filled moment, there’s a much higher chance that you might accidentally shoot another bystander.

“Good guy with a gun” is not a solution to “bad guy with a gun” because no amount of bullets fired by “good guys” will bring back the people who are already dead.

At a former job, there was one – and only one – lady in customer service who would actually reboot and do all the basic troubleshooting steps before calling IT. If we heard from her, we knew something was legitimately broken. Oddly enough, I’m married to her now. Best decision I ever made.

Just a matter of time before they add a higher deductible specifically for space junk. 😒

almost never

So you’re saying there’s a chance?

“I’m going to get so much done today.” or “If I clean the house, it’s going to stay that way for more than ten minutes.” are just some of the lies I tell myself to help me stay motivated

Pretty safe to say The Donald covets all kinds of things that aren’t his, especially power, and he has definitely missused the Lord’s name. So we’re at least up to five now. If we can interpret the fact that he has to put his name on everything as being a form of idolatry, that’ll be six.

Try having O Negative. They’ll practically chase you down the street.

I subscribe to two newspapers. My local weekly paper (which is actually owned by our large statewide newspaper), and the state “business” paper. They both cover topics I’m interested in although the quality of reporting in the business paper is better.

On a separate note, if you don’t support your local print media, it will go away. The demise of local news outlets, throughout the US anyway, has been ongoing for a long time now. That has not been a positive development.

No, there’s the original trilogy, the prequels, and the “Oh, it was Palpatine the whole time. …again. How original.”

My personal experience essentially echoes what you’ve said. I’ve usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.

The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here’s where things go off the rails.

Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he’s upset about and figures that if he doesn’t understand it, neither does anyone else. He’s also a little too proud to admit he doesn’t understand it.

This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.